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There are many examples of people wanting what they don't have. For example, a single man may want to have a girlfriend, but after some time of having a girlfriend, he may want to be single again. Or for example, people in the city may want to live in the village and villagers may want to live in the city.

What causes individuals to desire something they don't have and once they have it we desire to have something else -- or something which we left behind a while ago -- again?

Your examples are all about choices between alternatives that have different advantages and disadvantages. If you live in the city, there are a lot of things to do, better infrastructure, but no quiet and clean air. In the village, things are reversed. Obviously people want both: quiet, when they feel like quiet, action, when they want action, clean air all the time, and good infrastructure. The underlying cause is that people want both alternatives at the same time. Your question needs examples where alternatives are not the reverse of each other and not balanced regarding (dis)advantages.
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whatJul 3 '13 at 10:33

Thanks for input... actually, it was meant to discuss exactly these alternatives. Why you incline to "go back" once you left something because you wanted to have something else.
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tsykoraJul 3 '13 at 10:39

If had time I'd provide a more referenced answer, but once seeking behavior is procedural, dopamine responses become linked with the procedure of seeking itself (and then there's a let down if the object is not found).
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Keegan KeplingerJul 3 '13 at 15:31

5 Answers
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The reason for desire or want or liking is Pleasure. Various people have various things to get pleasure:
from Money, from Power, from Love etc. etc.

But this pleasure is always based on comparison.
For ex: I may have money, power, wealth and love. I am satisfied with all these. When I encounter another person who has all these things but with another proportion, then I tend to "HAVE/POSSESS" that. The reason could be, "THAT" appears more pleasurable to me than what I have.

There is no absolute answer to this question 'Why man seeks pleasure? or Where it comes from?'. We may need to understand the nature of pleasure, how it occurs etc etc.
Read this link and you may understand scientifically what is want/desire/liking/pleasure.

There is also a philosophical answer to your question which is related to mind. As put by Hindu philosophy, Mind always seeks pleasure. This pleasure, found in external things, is always in the form of self satisfaction. It feels happy with possession of things outside.

But once it turns inward and looks at itself, it understands its nature. This comes out of intelligence. Then it gradually seeks inner calmness rather external cravings. Resting in inner peace and calm is more happier and blissful to Mind. But it is under illusion that it finds pleasure in things in the external world. The reason being mind, as put by Hindu/Buddhist philosophers, identifies itself with the body and it thinks it has a separate individuality - "I", "ME","MINE". When there is a separation like this, automatically there is a comparison. When comparison exists, desire sprouts.
You better read about mind in Google. Lot of notes and articles are there.

Why we want things is a very broad question. As to why we specifically want things we don't have, I commented in jest that it does not make sense to want something you already have. Basically if you attach value to something you have, you would say that you “like” it, not that you “want” it but the distinction might not necessarily reflect a difference in some fundamental psychological process.

The immediate reason could be that these things provide us with “reward” or “pleasure” – which is certainly often true at a phenomenological level and can possibly be associated with specific brain structures – but that's not explaining much. As Greg mentioned, there are also many empirical results and theories suggesting that, to a point, we seek novelty and stimulation for their own sake. That could be a reason to want things specifically because we don't have them already or at least in part because we don't have them already. (The idea is very old and has been expressed in various ways, e.g. the Yerkes-Dodson law.)

On the specific point of regret and wanting to go back, one thing is that we are not always good at gauging how we will feel about something we have not experienced yet. Research on this goes under the name “affective forecasting”. Once you have it/did it/experienced it, you might realize that it is not as good as you expected and reverse your decision (or not, incidentally). Also, the notion that we seek novelty implies that the novel stimulus will become less pleasurable with repetition (but the opposite process has also been observed, e.g. in “mere exposure” research). At some point, we might become “bored” and find any change attractive, even if it is to come back to something we tried before.

As you mentioned, once you have it, you want something else you don't have and on and on and on it goes.

Reason being, once a subject acquires the object longed and desired for, the novelty level within the subject is diminished and must be refilled.

To be more specific, what needs to be refilled is dopamine. Novelty produces dopamine and dopamine is well know as the brain's fuel driving satisfaction. So remove that and guess what your going to try to reproduce?

Those things are extrinsic motivators. People believe that they will be happy if they get external things. Research says this isn't true. Once you get more money, for example, you quickly adapt to it. You may feel happy for a day or two, but then you go back to how you felt before.

There's very little difference in happiness between a person who makes 50,000 a year and a person who makes $50 million a year. There's a noticible difference in happiness between someone who makes 5,000 a year and someone who makes 50,000 a year. So as long as you can take care of your basic needs like food, shelter, etc, money won't make you happier.

Some of the information contained in this post requires additional references. Please edit to add citations to reliable sources that support the assertions made here. Unsourced material may be disputed or deleted.

People want the best stuff, which for the most part will never happen as most people are average joe's do they really expect to get a girl that looks like a Goddess, obviously if they do, they have dilusional fantasies that they spend their time on rather than on a reality check, of what they can actually accomplish. People also want stuff they can't have because they're jealous that someone has what they don't have, which makes them feel less than that person. There are many reasons why people are like that, but everyone that is like that shares all the basic fundamentals of jealousy, anger, feel less worthy, and want power. An example would be why do men rape pretty girls and boys, it is simply because they want the feeling of power to feel dominant and degrade the better things to make themselves feel better, Humans for the most part seek to demolish the better so they themselves can feel better, but deep in their consciousness they still know they really are just the same person and that just because they degraded something doesn't make them superior but rather inferior, since they have to prove it my trying to destroy something of better quality acutally proves to themselves that they are inferior.

Some of the information contained in this post requires additional references. Please edit to add citations to reliable sources that support the assertions made here. Unsourced material may be disputed or deleted.

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We prefer answers to have citations to researched work.
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user3543Nov 20 '13 at 23:00